AI search: what changes for SEO

Search is starting to answer questions directly instead of just handing you a list of links. Bing has had a chat that cites its sources for a year now, and Google is testing generated answers above the results. For a small business, the basics of SEO haven't changed overnight: clear pages with information only you have are the ones that get cited. What's changing: it matters more and more to be the page the answer is taken from.

What has actually changed in the past year

• Bing launched a chat inside its search engine in February 2023. Microsoft says the answers cite their sources, with links to the pages the information came from.
• Google announced the Search Generative Experience (SGE) in May 2023, an experiment in Search Labs: an AI-generated summary with links to pages, placed above the results. It launched only in the US and only in English. In Romania you won't see it in regular search yet.
• Chat assistants (ChatGPT, Google's assistant and others) are more and more often used for questions people used to type into Google.

Google says it wants to keep sending "valuable traffic" to websites. How much traffic will be left for simple questions, the kind whose answer fits in one paragraph, nobody knows for sure yet. Questions like "what are the opening hours," "how long does it take" or "what does this mean" are the first candidates to be answered right on the results page.

What Google says about AI-written content

In February 2023, Google clarified its position in an official post. In short:

1. What counts is the quality of the content, not how it was produced.
2. Content generated automatically, with AI or otherwise, mainly to manipulate rankings is spam and breaks the rules.
3. The criteria are still the ones known as E-E-A-T: experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.

Google's guide to helpful content asks a few questions worth asking about every page: does it offer original information, or just summarize what others have said? Does it show first-hand experience? Does the reader know who wrote it? If AI was used, is it clear to the reader how and why?

In practice, a text generated in five minutes and published without anything of your own added is exactly the kind of page neither Google nor an AI assistant has a reason to cite. There are a thousand like it already.

What kind of pages get cited

Generated answers lean on pages from which a clear fact can be pulled easily. A few things help, and most of them also appear in Google's helpful content guide:

• The direct answer, near the top. The first sentence after the heading says what was asked, then the details follow.
• Information only you have: your real opening hours, the areas you deliver to, what a service includes, your own photos, explanations from your own experience.
• Visible author and company. Who's writing, what the business does, contact details and address, all easy to find.
• Consistent details everywhere. The same name, address and phone number on your site, your Google profile and your social accounts.
• Separate pages for separate questions, instead of one huge page that half-answers everything.

None of this is new. It just matters now for a reader that isn't human, too.

Can you tell AI bots not to use your site?

Yes, partly, through your robots.txt file.

• Google-Extended is Google's signal for this. With it you decide whether your pages help improve Google's AI models. The documentation says plainly that it does not affect your site's inclusion in Google Search and isn't used as a ranking signal.
• Other AI companies have their own crawlers, with their own names, which you can block the same way. The exact names are in each company's documentation.

For a local business, blocking rarely makes sense: you want to be found and mentioned. It's mostly worth considering for people who sell content (articles, courses, photography).

What to do now

1. Rewrite the opening lines of your key pages so they directly answer the question people come with.
2. Put on your site what nobody can find anywhere else: what each service includes, how you work, your own examples, your own photos.
3. Sign your articles and have an "About us" page that says who you are.
4. Check that your name, address and phone number are identical everywhere.
5. If you use AI for writing, use it as a helper: you bring the facts and the experience, then you reread everything.

We have a page dedicated to this side of SEO: SEO for AI search. On writing website copy with ChatGPT, in more detail: Website copy written with ChatGPT: what works and what doesn't.